February 13, 2018

Worms

OREGON: A year and a half ago, Abby Beckley, of Grants Pass, then 26, felt a prickling in her left eye. She stood in front of a mirror and pulled a small, white worm from the surface of her eyeball.

At first, doctors at OHSU had no idea what the worm was. "It's very uncommon to have worms in the eye," Bonura said, especially in the United States.

So Bonura contacted the Centers for Disease Control, which determined the worms were Thelazia gulosa, a parasite that is usually found on cow eyeballs.

It's never been found in humans before. Doctors speculate that she got it from a face-fly while living on a cattle ranch. Eventually, over time, she pulled 14 worms out of her eyeball. And it appears that she got them all. But however she got the infection, there really isn't a cure; anti-parasite drugs would simply have killed the remaining worms, so they'd have remained, decomposing, in her eyeball. So there was nothing for it but to manually extract each worm that emerged.

But while it's the first known human case of parasitic infection from cow face-flies, other worms are somewhat more common:

Taenia Solium, more commonly called a pork tapeworm, passes to humans from consuming raw pork or through contact with fecal matter. Properly cooked pork, and good hygiene when handling food, kill the parasite.

In some extremely rare cases the worm will travel through your intestines, into your bloodstream and embed itself in your brain or eye ball.

The worm in the eye trifecta is officially open.

In the case of the tapeworm, it has to be removed pronto, because if it dies in the eye, you're blinded. But if it doesn't die, it'll head up into the brain and begin turning that into Swiss cheese. Either way, if you end up with one, you've got big trouble.

A non-worm related Florida tidbit: more than a third of all US cons who can't vote live in Florida. There are 4.7 million convicted felons in the USA; 1.7 million of whom live in the Sunshine State.